How does The Circle Partnership define "mid-level" for the purposes of its Circle Academy programme?
The Circle Partnership deliberately avoids imposing any age bracket or grade threshold on the term "mid-level." Instead, it invites applicants to self-define where they stand — and in practice, Circle Academy participants have ranged in age from 23 to 55, united not by seniority but by a shared sense that there is further to go.
Co-founders Vanessa Murray and Ceri Moyers acknowledge that this breadth of age and stage creates a genuine challenge: making the community-building element of the Circle Academy feel relevant and coherent across a 30-year span of participants' lives. That tension is one they openly name rather than paper over. The approach reflects a broader philosophy: the construction sector loses mid-level women at a disproportionate rate, and the first step to addressing that is meeting each woman where she actually is — not where an HR grading system says she should be. You can explore the full episode on Listenly's Pegasus Radio page.
"If you fix the women in inverted commas, you're not doing anything. If they're going back into a culture which isn't changing, you're still going to have the same problem."
— Vanessa Murray, Co-founder, The Circle PartnershipAbout Vanessa Murray
Vanessa Murray co-founded The Circle Partnership alongside Ceri Moyers, drawing on her background in the property side of the built environment sector. Over the six to seven years since the business launched, Murray and Moyers have built recognised expertise in the specific challenge of retaining and advancing mid-level women in construction and property — a demographic the sector consistently fails to keep. The Circle Partnership operates two complementary arms: the Circle Academy, a structured development programme combining mentoring and peer community for women who self-identify as mid-level, and a consultancy practice that advises organisations on the cultural and structural changes required to make retention gains sustainable. Murray's authority on this question comes not from a theoretical vantage point but from years of running a programme whose very design — the self-definition of "mid-level" — is itself a response to what she and Moyers observed happening inside construction businesses: that conventional grade-based categorisations were causing the sector to overlook and under-serve a wide and diverse group of women it could not afford to lose.